[Bananafish] Story

[Christopher Kubica]

There's a JDS bit in here...

CDMK
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URL: 
http://www.shns.com/shns/g_index2.cfm?action=detail&pk=WINTER-FILM-03-30-06

'Winter Passing' made smooth stage-to-film passage

By JOHN HAYES
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
30-MAR-06

It's about turmoil in the house of art. A struggling New York actor is
offered a small fortune for the personal letters that her world-famous
novelist father wrote to her less famous writer mom. When she returns to her
dysfunctional midwestern family home after the death of her mother, she
finds her recluse dad slipping into dementia, and struggles with the fierce
creative rivalry that long ago destroyed the family.

Having hung out with the creatively talented brother of the talented
director of "Winter Passing," I wondered where the story came from. A couple
of years ago, I spent a fun night bar-hopping with musician, stage and film
actor Anthony Rapp ("Dazed and Confused," "Six Degrees of Separation,"
"Twister," "A Beautiful Mind," "Rent") as he looked for musicians to back
him up in a production of "Hedwig and the Angry Inch."

Rapp spoke with pride of his brother Adam Rapp, a playwright.

It was logical, I thought, to ask if the creative tension and family
competition that Adam wrote into the Holdin family reflected a similar
creative sibling rivalry in the midwestern house of Rapp.

"Not really," he says. "My dad left when I was 4. Mom was a prison nurse.
Anthony and I are the only creative people in our extended family _ a large
Catholic family. Mom wanted to be a writer and wrote a lot of letters, but
we're the only artists in the family. Actually, I grew up an athlete.
College basketball."

He hints, however, of a competitive family dynamic far less dysfunctional
than that confronting the characters he invented in "Winter Passing."

"(Anthony and I) are competitive, but it's a healthy competition," says
Adam. "The more he succeeds, the more I want to succeed. He keeps me honest.
I'm glad, actually, that we do different things. That way, I can get
competitive in creative ways. If he were doing the same things as I do, it
would get weird."

As weird, perhaps, as the smoldering rivalry that has destroyed the Holdin
family in "Winter Passing." The famous novelist has allowed his professional
obsession and alcoholism to alienate his wife and daughter. When she
reluctantly returns home, she finds her father surrounded by a substitute
family of cultural misfits who are more defensive and supportive of him than
she is.

Adam says "Winter Passing" began as an idea for a play.

"I'm a big fan of J.D. Salinger, and I know someone who knows Salinger's
son. Matt (Salinger) went to his father's house for Thanksgiving about six
years ago. His father opened boxes of manuscripts he'd been working on for
50 years. He asked his son to burn them after he died. What bitterness. I
thought; that'd be an interesting character. How do you relate to a
character with a splintered mind who has started to slip into madness? What
about the children of the artist? That was the germ of the idea."

Adam had been courted by a West Coast agency that wanted him to write for
Hollywood, however, and his film agent encouraged him to turn his play
synopsis into a screenplay. The transference to another medium opened new
possibilities.

"Every medium has strengths," he says. "In literature, Joyce captured one
day in 750 pages. The social event, the voyeuristic experience that theater
is, gets changed with the close-ups, set changes and the mechanism of film."

The first-time screenwriter, first-time director wrote a letter to Ed Harris
asking him to star in his movie and got a quick "yes." Other key cast
members quickly fell into place. Will Ferrell was hired as an intentionally
not funny 35-year-old virgin Christian rocker, and Adam says he was thrilled
to get Zooey Deschanel ("Almost Famous," "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the
Galaxy," "Failure to Launch") in the key role of the novelist's daughter.

"Winter Passing" is rated R for language, some drug use and sexuality.

(John Hayes can be reached at jhayes(at)post-gazette.com)

(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.shns.com.)